My scrap tower is approaching avalanche levels. And Valentine’s Day is coming up, so I worked up an improvisational heart block.

Assuming you want a heart made in pink or red or some other rosy color, go find a scrap of fabric around 4.5×4.5″ or more in the red family. Also find some bits of a contrast color for the background. In this example I used white, but don’t let that keep you from using something else. This block needed about a 3×3″ piece, plus about 1.5×1.5″ piece, and then about a 30″ strip about 1.5″ wide of background.

These are the random pieces I dug out of the Tower O’Scraps. They needed to be ironed because they were so wrinkled from being jammed into the Tower. (AbNorma -from Tessuti Zoo – is looking on.)
Cut the heart fabric into two pieces. You should have rectangles. Incidentally, if your heart fabric is in strip form, that’s ok. You to have two pieces, relatively similar in width, about 2″ by 4-5″.

Cut the larger background fabric into two pieces diagonally. Set the triangles you’ve created now onto the rectangles and mirroring each other, sew a seam across each.

Trim off the excess heart fabric now. You’ll end up with something like this.

Next, cut a smaller scrap of background diagonally in half and set and sew in place as below. Again trim off the excess heart fabric.
Trim the hanging off edges of the triangles away and things start looking more romantic.
Sew the center seam between the two pieces.
In this block, I sewed background fabric around the heart, and then another contrast fabric trim.

My measurements are just guidelines. Like all hearts, improvisationally pieced hearts come in many sizes.